Elizabeth Sylvia
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esylviapoet.bsky.social
Elizabeth Sylvia
@esylviapoet.bsky.social
850 followers 740 following 990 posts
Poet, teacher, Massachusetts Class D Driver. SCYTHE (River River Books, 2026), MY LITTLE BOOK OF DOMESTIC ANXIETIES (Ballerini Books, 2025), NONE BUT WITCHES (3MH Press Book Award, 2022)

elizabethsylviapoet.net
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esylviapoet.bsky.social
This lady?
Photo of agent Peggy Carter, Captain America’s girlfriend
October 9, 2025 at 12:50 AM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
My first Best of the Net nomination, thanks to @thedodgemag.bsky.social
Field Pansy My nectar wooed the laden bees tumbling in the grass, flagrant below the sun, every pistil shuddering as their busy legs brushed me with fertile news Now there is less in the air, less show, less reaching towards the other So be it Bunkered, self-contained, fed rations of the known, resilience burrows each looped gene, makes my descendants pale duplicates Hoarding and blameless, I drop little pollen in the world’s begging cup, against present and expected loss, unfold scant shrunken blooms
September 24, 2025 at 11:37 PM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
Poets!

From A TRUCE THAT IS NOT PEACE by Miriam Toews
Another parable: I he first time 1 was invited to visit another city as a writer, I was housed in the backyard shed of an associate professor at the university where I'd be reading. A different professor, a poet, who'd arranged this trip, was supposed to have picked me up at the train station and housed me. But she had fallen in love. Now she couldn't put me up at her place after all, because of falling in love, and she couldn't pick me up at the station either. Love is love. Poets! The other woman, the associate professor, showed me the shed and said she was sorry, but it was the best she could do. She had moved the garden tools and lawn mower and oily rags into one corner of the shed. "Please don't smoke." A blow-up mattress lay in the other corner, with an air pump beside it in case it deflated during the night, as it was prone to, and the professor had brought in a lamp for me to use but only after dark. If you need the washroom, she said, please come to the house but knock first. Her five-year-old daughter was having a birthday party, and the professor was concerned that I would frighten the children if I, a perfect stranger, a perfect smoking stranger, suddenly appeared in the house needing to urinate.
September 24, 2025 at 2:21 AM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
Emily Dickinson getting a bit snippy
Touch lightly Nature's sweet Guitar Unless thou know'st the Tune Or every Bird will point at thee Because a Bard too soon -
September 16, 2025 at 10:05 PM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
I adore a little mail surprise like this thank you note from @whaleroadreview.bsky.social

Honestly so delightful. The tea even matches the stationery!

Issue 40 out now www.whaleroadreview.com
Orange thank you note, tea bag, and wrr sticker
September 15, 2025 at 11:32 PM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
At some point we stopped seeing soldiers like A and started seeing them like B. Was it Rambo? Our military is consumed by an entertainment optics and it would be ridiculous but it is lethal.
1960s vintage Black GI Joe doll Contemporary super-jacked GI Joe doll
September 6, 2025 at 2:26 AM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
Oh, just this little book that isn’t a Pulitzer finalist or anything….
Pink red and blue cover of The Unicorn Woman by Gayl Jones
August 28, 2025 at 10:51 AM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
Hey @upfromsumdirt.bsky.social do you recognize what I’m reading or is Crystal so renowned you can’t keep track of all the novels she features in?
August 28, 2025 at 2:36 AM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
Update, it is a beautiful handmade journal
Turquoise and gold hand bound journal
August 22, 2025 at 4:58 PM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
There was only one item in the mail today and it was an unexpected present for me! What a little treasure during a lousy time.
A small yellow package with a raffia bow
August 22, 2025 at 4:55 PM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
I am back with 2026's AWP word cloud. What will we see in Baltimore?
art (69) artistic (53) authors (68) book (123) brings (38) building (38) caucus (42) celebration (34) challenges (46) community (83) craft (200) create (37) criticism (158) cultural (62) development (67) editing (40) editors (56) engage (43) experiences (64) fiction (109) form (57) genres (121) identity (35) literature (49) narrative (43) nonfiction (47) offer (50) organizations (48) pedagogy (47) poetry (143) poets (91) practices (61) press (40) professional (46) program (54) publishing (161) queer (37) readers (42) readings (116) resistance (37) share (87) space (37) story (74) strategies (44) students (41) teaching (51) translation (51) voices (45) world (47) years (45)
August 22, 2025 at 1:12 AM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
@annwallace.bsky.social and I will be leading this workshop in Emily's garden next month. There will be bees and there will be blooms and there will be some bites, too. There's more than sweetness in the garden.
Promo for Poems in the Garden A Poetry Workshop with the Wild Story Podcast Paid In-Person workshop Sunday, September 21, 10 am ET The Wild Story A Podcast of Poetry and Plants by the Native Plant Society of New Jersey Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Emily Dickinson Museum
August 18, 2025 at 5:13 PM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
I’m staying at friends’ in Brooklyn this week and when I ventured out this morning the street looked like this and all I heard was the tinkling melody of the ice cream truck and I don’t think I want to go back to real life
Beautiful summer morning Brooklyn street scene of lush trees and brownstones
August 9, 2025 at 3:51 PM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
Getting to it for my NYPL research fellowship.
Left: Book “I Believe I Shall Die an Impenetrable Secret”: The Writings of Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard Right: a red composition notebook and a Blackwing pencil
August 7, 2025 at 3:31 PM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
Wasn’t this always the way —

Elizabeth Stoddard, 1869, at NYPL archives
The mag- azines and newspapers, I knew, were pub- lished for writers, and not readers-because there is nobody to read, and because there is every body to write
August 6, 2025 at 4:29 PM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
Lucie Brock-Broido
When the Gods Go, Half-Gods Arrive If it is true that you were young Once, a demiurge & did This-tell me then, supernatural One, exactly how Many days I have left to wake into & witness the things Of this world holding on, The hunched pillbug holding onto Its hump of hill, witness the boy In radiation walking straight- Faced into a radiant room which will burn him Just to stay here, be-alive how many nights. How much will I be changed, before I Am changed?
August 6, 2025 at 2:23 PM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
Here's the opening poem for my new chapbook MY LITTLE BOOK OF DOMESTIC ANXIETIES.

I'm waiving shipping for anyone who'd like a copy for their Sealey challenge this month!
Book cover of My Little Book of Domestic Anxiety. Green teacup filled with red liquid. The Trouble with a Liberal Arts Degree Up on the electrical wire a goldfinch perches with the sparrows, reminding me of a boy I knew. Nineteen, a cab-yellow Acura and a job coding at Microsoft. He made twice the money I did but never finished high school, lived alone outside the city in a building with fifty identical apartments. A motel bedspread of rot-colored flowers, not one picture on the walls above the only furniture: brown couch, television. I sat on the left. He pressed his tongue against the roof of my mouth, an arrow I couldn’t deflect. Boys I liked better, I remember less.
August 5, 2025 at 12:17 AM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
To publish this poem with no acknowledgment that it co-opts one of Auden’s most famous quotes and then to use that line as the pull quote?? What is happening at @poetryfoundation.bsky.social ?
Poetry Magazine fb post: Poetry makes nothing happen. —Asha Futterman in the current issue of Poetry Magazine. Followed by link. my hands are still my hands like my grandfathers hands are his hands and they are on the window attached to the body of a cage white and in the casket attached to a face that isn’t his face he died shoveling scores that melted the next day poetry makes nothing happen
July 28, 2025 at 11:30 AM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
So umm I got a new headshot
Portrait of a white, middle-aged, female-presenting person against a black background.
July 27, 2025 at 5:40 PM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
Has anybody else read RUE by Kathryn Nuernberger? I am just knocked by out by this book.
Book cover of RUE. Shades of white and beige, a collection by of small hand built ceramics evoking natural shapes and a collages female figure Pissy Bitch Middle-Aged Happy I probably always loved nature but came late to understanding it or maybe that's how it is for everybody. By the time you know you don't want to eat the serviceberries lining the trail unless things have gotten truly dire you might be feeling pretty dire. The skin on the whole bottom half of my face is so loose now I feel it sort of flopping around down there. I chew a little on the inside part sometimes when I'm concentrating because I'm old and there's just so much extraneous face of me down there at the bottom half of my face. If you asked, I'd describe myself as looking a bit like a pissed-off possum. Not that I'm complaining. It's a great face, relatively speaking, and anyway I hardly ever have to look at it. I use it for staring at these pines that tree their way down to that stretch of water in an interlocking pattern of thinner and fatter trunks weaving under and over the crinkles of my birch-bark eyes. I've lived long enough now to know when a hillside was clear-cut and then replanted in a single afternoon as opposed to left alone for enough years that the forest happened without intention or just an infinite number of individual intentions, some of which were choked out or eaten and others compromised by a fast-growing shade, but glad enough to be even sideways and hard-scrabbled in their reaching, considering the alternatives. Although not every juniper bush can be a glass-half-full kind of evergreen. For me, for instance, life has turned out pretty good, and still I say, "Fuck you, Douglas fir, firm and lush and tall, for taking up so much of my sky." And then I smile to myself, because it's funny to be so petty inside a face with all this skin, enough to fill a room if I were to stretch it out.
July 21, 2025 at 1:42 PM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
Feels personal
July 18, 2025 at 11:13 AM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
Outdoor movie night at the Louvre
Interior courtyard of the Louvre museum with rows of chairs and a huge movie screen
July 3, 2025 at 6:09 PM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
Hey I have a new chapbook and I’m a really good live reader.

I’ll be in NYC August 5-10th for a NYPL research fellowship and I would love to read with somebody or do an open mic.
Cover of MY LITTLE BOOK OF DOMESTIC ANXIETIES, poems by Elizabeth Sylvia, featuring a bubbling acid green background and a Birds Eye view of a green teacup filled with red liquid
June 30, 2025 at 3:13 PM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
Summer vibes
Black and tan to rat terrier stretched out wide in the shade on a gray deck with no cares in the world
June 30, 2025 at 2:49 PM
esylviapoet.bsky.social
Hey @riverriverbooks.bsky.social , isn’t my river looking pretty?
Mouth of the Mattapoisett River, very placid, as the sun sets, bordered by marsh grass and trees, light reflecting off the water
June 30, 2025 at 12:05 AM